Picture Perfect

by Catherine Clark

  “Not this past year—two Christmases ago,” I corrected him. “I know. And they sent a picture, which I begged them not to do.”

  Spencer cleared his throat. “It wasn’t just one picture. It was a collage,” he said.

  “That wasn’t my idea!” I protested, laughing. “Anyway, you know how you can be really into something for a while, and then it’s just not your thing anymore.”

  “Like you and Sesame Street,” Heather teased Spencer.

  “I just realized that it was taking up all my time. You can’t do anything else, it’s your whole life, which is fine for some people, but it wasn’t for me,” I said. “I kind of wanted to have a normal life.”

  “Good luck with that,” Spencer muttered.

  After a while it had been more my mother’s dream than my own, to be truthful. I still loved dance and I always would, but there was so much more to me than just ballet. Or at least that’s what I thought when I realized I wanted to quit. Other people might see it differently—in fact, were seeing it differently. Talk about being typecast.

  “So if you’re no longer a prima ballerina,” said Spencer, “what are you into?”

  “Photography,” I said.

  “Oh, really? Just that?” asked Spencer.

  “Why, what am I supposed to be into?” I retorted.

  “Spencer, somehow you can insult people without trying very hard. Have you noticed?” Heather said. “I mean, good luck making friends at college, with that attitude. Speaking of. Where are you two going to college?” she asked. “We never heard. Is the reason we don’t already know because you didn’t get in anywhere?”

  “Yeah, right,” Spencer muttered. “Didn’t you get the press release? I’m going to Linden.”

  I nearly choked on the smoothie sip I’d just taken. Did he just say “Linden”? I wondered. Maybe he said Clinton. Or London.

  “Wait a second,” I said. “I thought you were at the University of Vermont.”

  “You’re transferring?” asked Heather, not sounding nearly as stunned as I did. “Cool! You’ll be a sophomore there, so you can be our cool, older friend. Well, older anyway.”

  “But I thought you were at UVM,” I said again. “I mean, you have the shirt. And everything.”

  “And you have a UNC sweatshirt and that doesn’t mean anything, does it?”

  “No, but—”

  “Anyway, I won’t be a sophomore, because I changed my mind and took the last year off to volunteer. I’ll be a freshman like you guys, well, except I have some AP credits, and I’ll still be older than you, and therefore more mature, and you’ll be lucky if I talk to you at Linden,” Spencer said, then he smiled. “Kidding.”

  “We’re going to be so popular, you’ll be lucky if we talk to you,” Heather replied.

  I tried not to think of how weird that would be, at a small school with Spencer, the guy I’d made my one and only pass at. Would I have to bribe him to keep it to himself?

  Then again, maybe he didn’t even really remember. It had been the last night of our trip to the Dells when I blurted out how we should stay in touch and how we were such a good match. I’d still had that electrified feeling—maybe fried was a better word for it—when I first saw him today, but who knew what he was up to these days? Maybe he had a serious girlfriend back home. I’d have to find out.

  Anyway, I’d had serious changes in my life, too, since then. Serious relationships. Okay, mostly just in my mind, but still.

  Linden only had about 1,100 students, but it wasn’t that small a campus. It wasn’t as if he’d be in all my classes. He’d probably stay away from me—far away.

  “So what did you do all last year, then? As a volunteer?” I asked.

  “I worked in New Orleans on hurricane relief projects—building houses, rebuilding schools—”

  “Then how come your parents didn’t mention that in their holiday letter?” Heather teased.

  “My parents don’t send a holiday letter,” he said.

  “Oh. So they’re the normal ones,” I observed. Spencer already seemed conceited enough, so I didn’t tell him how cool I thought that was, that he took time off to help other people. That was the kind of thing I’d totally wanted to do myself, but I didn’t have the guts to just put my life on hold. He did. “So what exactly made you volunteer?” I asked.

  “Um, I don’t know.” He fiddled with the napkin under his coffee cup. He looked a little flustered by the question. “Just, you know. Seemed like I could use a break from school and my community center was sending people to help, so…”

  Heather started to smile. “So let me get this straight. You’ll be a freshman, like us. You, who’ve tortured us and taunted us every year about being so much older than us—”

  “Which I still am. And I might be a freshman, but I couldn’t be like you guys even if I tried.”

  “Oh, of course not. Never.” I rolled my eyes. “Heather, how in the world are we ever going to fit our baby cribs and playpens into our dorm rooms?”

  She smiled. “So what about you, Adam?” Heather asked. “Oh, wow. Don’t tell me we’re all going to Linden. Is it something they put in our drinking water?”

  “Um. Speaking of water. Does anyone else besides me need some?” Adam started to get up and head to the counter.

  “Dodging the question, huh?” Heather prodded.

  “I was trying to,” he said with an awkward laugh as he sat back down. “I don’t know where I’m going to end up in the fall. Actually I got into Oregon State, but I’m, um, wait-listed at Linden. But I’m sure I’ll get in. Totally. Just mailed in my application late, that’s all. They’re going to give me a hard time about it and make me wait. I’m a legacy—we all are. They always let in legacies.” He coughed. “Right?”

  My cell started ringing. It was my dad’s ring tone—I have it set to the Linden school song. When everyone heard that, they started laughing and accusing me of being obsessed already.

  “Where are you?” Dad asked.

  “We’re having coffee,” I said.

  “Coffee? You don’t drink coffee at night,” he said.

  Somehow that made him worry that I wasn’t telling the truth. “What, do you think I’m making that up? Okay, so the deep dark truth is that I’m having a smoothie. At a coffee shop,” I said. “And afterward we’re going to walk around and check out the area.”

  “Check out what?” Dad asked.

  I swear he’s not that old and hard of hearing. I just have a crummy phone. Again, my parents tend to opt for the bargains in life—with the exception of what they’d spent over the years on ballet, for me. The phone had been “refurbished,” but apparently its first owner was an octopus, or someone who spent a lot of time in the sea. It had a constant bubbling sound in the background.

  Heather grabbed the phone from me and said, “We haven’t seen each other in forever, Mr. Matthias. We have a lot to talk about, okay?”

  I could hear my dad laughing over the phone as they spoke for a minute, then Heather handed it back to me. “We’ll be back soon,” I promised.

  “Parents still a little overprotective, huh?” asked Adam as I slipped my phone back into my pocket.

  “A smidge,” I said. Over the past year, my parents had been gradually adjusting to the fact that my social life wasn’t entirely about ballet anymore. They were having a hard time with the fact they couldn’t always reach me at the studio, where I’d be hanging out with three other dancers. Even if there were guys around—like an occasional partner from time to time—usually they weren’t my type, or rather, I wasn’t theirs.

  “Don’t worry, we can always sneak out later.” Heather picked up her coffee cup and slid her handbag over her shoulder.

  “We can?” I asked.

  “Sure. Didn’t you see how many doors that house had? There’s no way they can keep track of us every second.” She smiled, then put her arm around my shoulder and we sort of danced out of the coffee shop.

  We headed back to
the house, and Heather and I caught up some more while Adam and Spencer walked ahead of us, having an in-depth discussion about baseball. I think. I never watch baseball, so I had no idea what they were talking about, actually.

  “Okay, so here’s the way I see it.” Heather smoothed her long blond hair back into a barrette. We’d always been complete opposites: She was blond, I was brunette; she was loud, and I was quiet; she was bold and I was, well, faint. Un-bold.

  “We’re here for our last real vacation before we head to college, which will be very serious and boring and not fun,” Heather continued.

  “It will? What about the parties?” I asked. “The football games, the frats—you know, all the things our dads—” I caught myself, feeling horribly insensitive. “The stuff the guys go on and on about, reliving their glory days.”

  “Just work with me for a second. What I’m trying to say is that we have fourteen days here, so let’s find some amazing guys to have summer flings with. Are you in?”

  “Uh…is that the plan?” I asked. She made it sound so easy.

  “Pretty much. I’ll help you find a guy, and you’ll help me find one, which shouldn’t be that hard because it seems like there are tons of them around here on vacation just like us…”

  “True,” I agreed, thinking of our hot next-door neighbor, whatever his name was.

  “And we’ll just have one of those painstakingly sad brief summer love affairs—”

  I laughed. “You’ve been watching too many movies,” I said. “That doesn’t happen in real life.”

  “What do you know about real life, anyway? You’ve been stuck in a dance studio the past five years,” Heather teased.

  “Hm. You might have something there,” I agreed.

  “You have perfect posture and positions, and like, no dates,” Heather said. “Am I right?”

  “Well, you don’t have to make me sound that pathetic,” I replied with a laugh.

  She laughed, too. “Hey, I’m only saying that because I know that’s how I was with gymnastics. I spent every summer at gymnastics camp, every afternoon training…I loved it, but it puts some serious limits on your social life.”

  “True.” I remembered wishing I didn’t have so many commitments, that I had time to just hang out at the mall and boy-shop with my friends.

  “Anyway. This will be something short, just a fling. It’s not something that you’re going to continue, like a relationship or whatever. I mean, I guess if it worked out, and you didn’t live completely on other sides of the country—but be realistic. We’re going off to college and we’re not going to be tied down to some guy who isn’t even there.”

  I stopped walking and looked at her. “Wow. You have thought about this a lot. Did you map out the whole thing, like what we say and when we say it?” Because I can use that kind of help, I thought. A sheet of instructions. No, a booklet. And a website with updates.

  “Shut up, it was a long plane ride this morning. I had time,” she said. “So. We’ll get started first thing tomorrow. What we need to do is meet some guys and—”

  “I already met someone,” I admitted.

  “Are you kidding?” She pushed me. “When?”

  “Right when we were leaving tonight! I almost got my head cut off by a Frisbee, but it was worth it, because I met the guy next door. Really nice. He loaned me this sweatshirt.”

  “So that’s where you got it,” she said, nodding. “Really. Well, this sounds promising! So what was his name?”

  “Name? Well, um…”

  “You didn’t get his name?” Heather demanded.

  “I didn’t tell him my name, either, so—”

  “And that makes it right?”

  “He’s staying next door to us. We’ll see him again.”

  “Still. You ask a guy’s name. It lets them know you’re interested. I mean, are you with me, or not?”

  “Fine. I’ll get his name first thing tomorrow,” I promised.

  I wasn’t planning to tell Heather how clueless I was about dating, but I didn’t think I’d need to. She could tell.

  To tell the truth, I was starting to think that I’d head to college without ever having had a real boyfriend—and a date at the seventh-grade dance didn’t count.

  That sounded so, so wrong. And so very, very likely.

  But it wasn’t as if I’d tried to be single. Forever. It just worked out that way. And it wasn’t only the Spencer incident, where I’d failed miserably.

  When I was a junior, there was this one British guy I totally loved named Gavin. He moved. To Arizona. I mean, what were his parents thinking, moving to Arizona, when he’s British? For some reason he belonged more in Wisconsin. Because of me, because I was there. Not that I ever managed to talk to him for more than ten minutes, and not that I ever had the nerve to ask him out. But still, I loved him. Deeply.

  Then, on a more serious note, there was my friend Terence, who lived down the block and who I used to spend all my time with. At one point senior year I realized that I loved him also. Like, in the way that you shouldn’t love a guy who’s essentially your best friend. I kept trying to tell him how I felt, but I couldn’t, and then he went out with my friend Shauna. Which wasn’t fair at all, because I knew him a lot longer than she did, and all of a sudden we weren’t allowed to hang out as much as we used to.

  Anyway, the whole Terence and Shauna situation was over now—they’d broken up after only two months together—but I still have a heart scar from that.

  Maybe a fling was the answer. A fling in which nobody got deeply involved and, therefore, nobody got hurt. And one in which I never had to tell a guy how I felt or how long I’d felt that way or hear him say sorry, but he didn’t have the same feelings for me.

  I hated the word “feelings,” come to think of it.

  “Define ‘fling,’” I said to Heather as we walked up the steps onto the deck at the back of the house. “Because ‘fling’ is ‘feeling’ without the two e’s.”

  “Actually any good fling should have a couple e’s in it. Like, ‘ee, this is fun, ee, he’s kidding me—’”

  “Kidding me? That doesn’t sound fun,” I commented, laughing.

  “Kissing me, I meant to say. Give me a break, I have jet lag,” Heather said. “You know, it’s a romantic evening. You hold hands. You gaze at each other.” She shrugged. “You act and feel goofy. You kiss. Dance, maybe.”

  “That’s it?” I asked, climbing into a chair beside the pool.

  “The rest is optional.” She sat down beside me in a chaise lounge chair. “Fun, but optional.”

  We both laughed.

  “Have you…? I mean, would you…?” I whispered.

  “No. I’ve had the chance, but you know, the person—the timing—it wasn’t right. And I definitely don’t think it’s something you should do on, like, vacation. With some guy you don’t really know all that well.”

  “Agreed,” I said.

  “But you could make out.”

  I leaned back and looked up at the sky. “Right.”

  “And if you got carried away…”

  “No.” I shook my head. “Still not. Too risky.” The whole thing sounded too risky, if you asked me. If I didn’t do well with guys I already knew, how would I handle things any better with strangers?

  But I’d try to follow Heather’s lead, the way I did every time we were on vacation together. When we were about eight, she dared me to eat ten red-hot fireball candies in a row, so I did. That same trip, she dared me to jump off a tire swing into a lake, and I did that, too.

  I ended up with a burning-hot mouth and a red stomach from belly-flopping. That was when I decided that maybe Heather wasn’t the best role model for me.

  But maybe there were events worth following her in. And if Heather could find a guy to have an innocent—or fairly innocent—summer fling with, why couldn’t I?

  Besides, I’d already met someone. For once, I was a step ahead of her.

  “What are you guys so
busy talking about?” Mrs. Olsen had walked out onto the deck, followed by my mom.

  “You could have told us the bad news, Mom,” Heather said.

  Mrs. Olsen looked a bit panicked for a second. “What bad news?”

  “That Spencer’s following us to Linden.”

  My mother laughed. “What? I, for one, think it’s wonderful news,” she said. “Don’t you think so, Emily?”

  I thought that it was strange. Weird. Potentially nice, because it never hurts to know lots of people. And potentially very embarrassing, because sometimes it’s the wrong kind of people, the ones you’ll never, ever turn to because they’d mock you for it.

  “Sure, Mom. It’s wonderful,” I murmured, glancing over at Spencer. Absolutely, positively, wonderfully bizarre.

  Heather suddenly jumped up and grabbed hold of my hands. “Come on, Em, let’s go.”

  “What?”

  “We need to talk some more—in private,” she said under her breath as she pulled me by the wrist. “We need a plan of attack, don’t you think? We’re just going down to the beach, stick our toes in the water!” she announced over her shoulder to everyone.

  “If you’re not back in fifteen minutes, I’m sending someone after you!” my mother called.

  “Fine. Just send someone cute from next door,” Heather added and we laughed as we ran down the steps toward the ocean.

  Chapter 4

  “Emily! Emily!”

  I turned my head and slid my sunglasses down my nose to see who was calling my name. I was lying in a bikini on the beach with an open book across my bare stomach—I guess I’d fallen asleep while I was reading.

  When I could focus, I saw that it was the guy from next door. I couldn’t believe it. The same guy who’d loaned me his UNC sweatshirt, and before that, nearly decapitated me with a Frisbee. He was jogging down the beach toward me, wearing shorts, no shirt, with a striped beach towel slung around his neck, calling my name. “Em-i-ly! Em-i-ly!”